While the connections between the plans to destroy Syria and the Obama administration are generally known, what is even less well-known is the fact that there existed a plan to destroy Syria as far back as not only the Bush administration but also the Reagan Administration in 1983.

Documents contained in the U.S. National Archives and drawn up by the CIA reveal a plan to destroy the Syrian government going back decades. One such document entitled, “Bringing Real Muscle To Bear In Syria,” written by CIA officer Graham Fuller, is particularly illuminating. In this document, Fuller wrote,

Syria at present has a hammerlock on US interests both in Lebanon and in the Gulf — through closure of Iraq’s pipeline thereby threatening Iraqi internationalization of the [Iran-Iraq] war. The US should consider sharply escalating the pressures against Assad [Sr.] through covertly orchestrating simultaneous military threats against Syria from three border states hostile to Syria: Iraq, Israel and Turkey.

Even as far back as 1983, Syrian President Bashar al-Assad’s father, Hafez Assad, was viewed as a gadfly to the plans of Western imperialists seeking to weaken both the Iraqis and the Iranians and extend hegemony over the Middle East and Persia. The document shows that Assad and hence Syria represented a resistance to Western imperialism, a threat to Israel, and that Assad himself was well aware of the game the United States, Israel, and other members of the Western imperialist coalition were trying to play against him.

The question of the Assad thorn in the side of the West continued on for the United States as was evidenced by yet another CIA document from 1986 entitled “Syria: Scenarios of Dramatic Political Change.” Although not an open advocation of destabilization and/or war, the paper does examine the possibilities of destabilization and “regime change” in Syria, most notably in the scenario of mass unrest, Muslim Brotherhood manipulation and violence, defections, and a coup.

After giving a summation of “The Present Scene” and “Major Players” that include Hafez Assad’s inner circle, the military, Sunnis, and Muslim Brotherhood, the paper goes into a description of possible ways Assad’s government could be brought down and replaced with one more friendly to Western interests. The ways in which this takedown could be accomplished ranged from a military coup, a military defeat, and/or mass public unrest and destabilization. It should also be noted that the report attempts to paint Sunnis and the Muslim Brotherhood as one in the same. However, the MB does not and never has represented the majority of Sunnis in Syria. Thus, when the CIA document mentions “Sunnis” it is referring to the extremist Muslim Brotherhood factions of society.

In a subsection entitled, “Communal Violence Escalates Into Civil War,” the document reads,

Sunni dissidence has been minimal since Assad crushed the Muslim Brotherhood in the early 1980s, but deep-seated tensions remain – keeping alive the potential for minor incidents to grow into major flareups of communal violence. For example, disgruntlement over price hikes, altercations between Sunni citizens and police forces, or anger at privileges accorded to Alawis at the expense of Sunnis could foster small-scale protests. Excessive government force in quelling such disturbances might be seen by Sunnis as evidence of a government vendetta against all Sunnis, precipitating even larger protests by other Sunni groups.

Sunni merchants and artisans probably would launch protests similar to those staged in previous years, for example by closing down businesses and the bazaars in Hamah or Aleppo and possibly Damascus. Sunni students would stage campus demonstrations, and Sunni professional associations would organize stoppages. Mistaking the new protests as a resurgence of the Muslim Brotherhood, the government would step up its use of force and launch violent attacks on a broad spectrum of Sunni community leaders as well as on those engaged in the protests. Regime efforts to restore order would founder if government violence against protesters inspired broad-based communal violence between Alawis and Sunnis.

A general campaign of Alawi violence against Sunnis might push even moderate Sunnis to join the opposition. Remnants of the Muslim Brotherhood – some returning from exile in Iraq – could provide a core of leadership for the movement. Although the regime has the resources to crush such a venture, we believe brutal attacks on Sunni civilians might prompt large numbers of Sunni officers and conscripts to desert or to stage mutinies in support of dissidents, and Iraq might supply them with sufficient weapons to launch a civil war.

Indicators Of A Developing Scenario

Strikes and demonstrations demanding government action to end discrimination against Sunnis become frequent.

Security personnel force businesses to reopen and confiscate the inventories of many.

Thus, while observing potential flareups for social violence, one major aspect of the destabilization of 2011, the CIA viewed the Sunni population, more specifically the Muslim Brotherhood, as the one that would be the most volatile element of society and also that it might be funded from the outside. The CIA predicted “defections” and a “civil war” drawn along religious lines. This “potential” situation was attempted by the CIA in 2011 but was forced to rely on outside Sunni fighters since the fiercely secular Syrian people were not able to be coaxed into a religious civil war as easily as the CIA imagined.

The CIA document also addressed the “Soviet Angle,” opining about ways in which the strong ties between the Russia/Soviet Union and Syria could be broken and the situations which might bring that separation about. The document comes to the conclusion that a military defeat, most likely against Israel, would prove Soviet weapons and military training inferior, forcing Syria to rely more heavily on the West for training and equipment and thus become more pliable to the Western agenda.

In the section entitled, “Implications For The United States,” the document states that the most ideal situation for the US would be to see the Assad government overthrown and replaced by a “Sunni regime controlled by business-oriented moderates.” This essentially refers to a Muslim Brotherhood coup against the Syrian government which would of course follow with a regime that is much more favorable and cooperative with the Western agenda than that of Assad’s Syria. The document also hints at the desire to see the new “Sunni business-oriented moderate” government’s interest in the “private sector,” which historically has come to mean major Western corporations that take over public services and natural resources and turn them into commodities.

While this document did not provide a strategy by which to achieve the desired outcomes it lists (at least not in the sanitized declassified version), it still follows the same train of thought as the CIA document released three years prior in that it hopes for the collapse of deposition of the Assad government and the replacement of that government with one that is more friendly to Western aims. The US government went ahead with the implementation of this plan in 2011 that has resulted in over 400,000 deaths in Syria over the course of seven years of warfare.

The Flemish Father Daniël Maes (78) lives in Syria in the sixth-century-old Mar Yakub monastery in the city of Qara, 90 kilometers north of the capital Damascus. Father Daniel has been a witness to the “civil war” andaccording to him, Western reports on the conflict in Syria are very misleading. In short: “the Americans and their allies want to completely ruin the country”.

Interviewer: You are very critical of the media coverage on Syria. What is bothering you?

Father Daniel: “The idea that a popular uprising took place against President Assad is completely false. I’ve been in Qara since 2010 and I have seen with my own eyes how agitators from outside Syria organized protests against the government and recruited young people. That was filmed and aired by Al Jazeera to give the impression that a rebellion was taking place. Murders were committed by foreign terrorists, against the Sunni and Christian communities, in an effort to sow religious and ethnic discord among the Syrian people. While in my experience, the Syrian people were actually very united”.

If you were a journalist in Libya during this time you were relatively safe; not because these animals respected journalists as neutral observers, but because the journalists were on their side. The Moriartys have evidence of embedded journalists, not least from Qatar-owned Al Jazeera, whose staff were among the terrorists from day one, personally calling in airstrikes and working side-by-side with the terrorists.

Father Daniel: Before the war, this was a harmonious country: a secular state in which different religious communities lived side by side peacefully.There was hardly any poverty, education was free, and health care was good. It was only not possible to freely express your political views. But most people did not care about that.”

Interviewer: Sister Agnès-Mariam, the Lebanese-French prioress of your Mar Yakub (“Saint Jacob”) monastery, is accused of siding with the regime. She has friends at the highest level.

Father Daniel: “Sister Agnès-Mariam helps the population: she has recently opened a soup kitchen in Aleppo, where 25,000 meals are prepared five times a week. Look, it is miraculous that we are still alive. We owe that to the army of Assad’s government and to Vladimir Putin, because he decided to intervene when the rebels threatened to take power.

Father Daniel: When thousands of terrorists settled in Qara, we became afraid for our lives. They came from the Gulf States, Saudi Arabia, Europe, Turkey, Libya, there were many Chechens. They formed a foreign occupation force, all allied to al-Qaeda and other terrorists. Armed to the teeth by the West and their allies with the intention to act against us, they literally said: “This country belongs to us now.” Often, they were drugged, they fought each other, in the evening they fired randomly. We had to hide in the crypts of the monastery for a long time. When the Syrian army chased them away, everybody was happy: the Syrian citizens because they hate the foreign rebels, and we because peace had returned.”

Interviewer: You say that the Syrian Army protects civilians, yet there are all sorts of reports about war crimes committed by Assad’s forces, such as the bombardments with barrel bombs.

Father Daniel: “Do you not know that the media coverage on Syria is the biggest media lie of our time? They have sold pure nonsense about Assad: It was actually the rebels who plundered and killed. Do you think that the Syrian people are stupid?Do you think those people were forced to cheer for Assad and Putin? It is the Americans who have a hand in all of this, for pipelines and natural resources in this region and to thwart Putin.”

Saudi Arabia and Qatar want to establish a Sunni state in Syria, without religious freedom. Therefore, Assad must go. You know, when the Syrian army was preparing for the battle in Aleppo, Muslim soldiers came to me to be blessed. Between ordinary Muslims and Christians, there is no problem. It is those radical Islamic, Western-backed rebels who want to massacre us. They are all al Qaeda and IS. There are not any moderate fighters anymore.”

Interviewer: You once mentioned Hillary Clinton to be a ‘devil in holy water’, because as foreign minister, she deliberately worsened the conflict.

Father Daniel: “I am happy with Trump. He sees what every normal person understands: That the United States should stop undermining countries which possess natural resources. The Americans’ attempt to impose a unipolar world is the biggest problem. Trump understands that radical Islam is a bigger threat than Russia.

What do I care whether he occasionally takes off his pants? If Trump practices geopolitics the way he has promised to do so, then the future looks bright. Then it will become similar to Putin’s approach. And hopefully then, there will be a solution for Syria, and peace will return.”

Interviewer: You understand that your analysis is controversial and will encounter much criticism?

Father Daniel: “I speak from personal observation. And no one has to believe me, right? But I know one thing: The media can either contribute to the massacre of the Syrian people or help the Syrian people, with their media coverage. Unfortunately, there are too many followers and cowards among journalists”.

In a pre-emptive smart initiative, the institute of the Iraqi Dialogue headed by the Sheikh Humam Hamoudi, the member in the body of the Head of Representatives in cooperation with the University of Baghdad, the Iraqi Parliament and, and with a remarkable participation from each of the President of the Republic, the Speaker of the Parliament, the Prime Minister, and the heads and the representatives of the main political components has called for a conference under the title of Iraq and the Dialogue after the victory, and in conjunction with a permanent search in the corridors of the Iraqi politics about the settlement’s items that affect issues that were a matter of suspicion and fear to debate among the Iraqis for a decade ago. Iraq is a Levantine Arab citadel through its population, area, wealth, minds, and status according to active present history and geography.

Iraq will enter the year 2018, after it has freed from three successive burdens, a regime among it the Iraqis have divided till it fell, knowing that some of them felt of cold after it had fallen, and some of them on the early days of the US occupation felt of some kind of warmth comparing with the frost of the former regime. Despite the fact that the continuation of the division around the occupation did not last, but it led to a division around the new regime that is no less than the former regime, even if the opportunities of expression and the frameworks of change were more and available. But after Iraq and the Iraqis have been liberated relatively from the burden of the occupation, they got a heavier burden that re-imposes some of the occupation and some of the former regime along with some of the divisions around them, in addition to the burden of ISIS. But most importantly is that the majority of the Iraqis have agreed to wage the war of confrontation, salvation, and the search for a dialogue that renews the social coherence among the Iraqis on the basis that the first power of Iraq comes from the degree of the cohesion of its interior not the degree of the cohesion of some of its interior with some of its exterior against some of the other part of its interior with some of the other part of its exterior.

This time, the Iraqi Dialogue is a test of the experience before it is a national test that does not lack any of the Iraqis even if they were different in employing its keys and in determining its taboos, only the experience prevents them from turning the different judgments into new division. The experience here is the ability to get the message; first a unified Iraq where the dispute is ravaging in it is better for the components of Iraq than a secession that leads to the rule of the one vote in more than Iraq. Second, the concessions which allay the concerns and extinguish the fears of the partners are the reaping of tomorrow, while scoring the points of the winning on the partner is a revenge for the past. Third, who is the strongest is the one who is demanded to give but he gives up, the one who abandons a force leads, and the one who sticks to the force rules. The competitive Iraqis on tomorrow and their roles in it have to choose between either to run as candidates to lead Iraq or to rule it, remembering always that whenever one has the opportunity to rule, it will not be as it was at the era of the former regime and the occupation.

Iraq approaches from its victory while the world and region change, but the most change that occurs is that the important players are no longer as they were, and that the thoughts which prevailed and dominated during a quarter of a century ago since the fall of Berlin Wall and the rule of the philosophy of the end of the history, and the savage uni-globalization, which the occupation of Iraq was one of its vocabularies are retreating paving the way for everything national. Now America as a symbol of the era which has passed is preparing for the coming era through its nationalism no matter how crude and exaggerated to the extent of racism it is, and in the time of sticking to the special identities and nationalism it has the sovereignty and the legitimacy as two vocabularies that approached from the level of passing and falling in the past quarter – century. By the force of the legitimacy and the sovereignty the Iraqis will discover the points of strength that they did not consider before. As the geography and the history show present elements in the present-industry by drawing the results of the wars and the options of peace, and away from the partisanships, emotions, the warmth of emotions of the biases which were inherited in the time of division, and with the replacement of all of that with the reflection in the history and geography the Iraqis will be able to draw the road map of their future.

The most important conclusion is that the unified Iraq is a power for the Iraqis, at their forefronts those who imagine that the secession is the way of independence, but the weak independence is a dependency, and in order to turn the unity into power there must be a recognition of the joy of the privacies not a call for their abolition. Iraq and Syria are Levantine Arab and Islamic base for making politics, culture, and the economy for their region, through their separation the Levant falls and the Arabs and the Muslims enter the time of rivalry and non-politics. Together they form their roles as a bridge for a dialogue between all the components of the Arab and the Muslim neighborhood and the bases of alliances for its force as well as a rehabilitation of the concept of the national security which the Kurdish Saladin Al Ayoubi has formulated for the Arabs and the Muslims and which its compass is Jerusalem.